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The Real Reason Susan Rice Didn't Deserve to Be Secretary of State

This article is by Gregory J. Wallance, a lawyer and human rights activist who is the author of America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy.

Susan Rice (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)

Susan Rice’s bid to become secretary of state was derailed because of the Republican uproar over her Sunday morning talk show statements about who was behind the September 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Libya. But although that may have been the causative event, it should not have forced her to withdraw her bid. After all, all she had done was recite the intelligence community consensus.

Lost in the political commotion was a recent one-day news story about Ambassador Rice’s handling of a pressing human rights issue in Africa. In the fall, Ambassador Rice delayed publication of a United Nations report denouncing Rwanda’s support for a rebel group, known as M23, that has committed mass atrocities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She also intervened to water down a Security Council resolution that strongly condemned M23 for widespread rape, summary executions, and use of child soldiers in the Congo, where 3 million have died in a decade of violence. The official U.S. government explanation is that more confrontational diplomacy would have jeopardized delicate negotiations with Rwanda, Uganda, and the Congo.

Unfortunately, her handling of M23 echoes a shameful event in American diplomatic history. In 1942, when career diplomats of the wartime State Department received a report from the U.S. legation in Switzerland of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe, the patrician diplomats suppressed the report because of, as one explained, “the impossibility of our being of any assistance.” Then, after the information did get out, they watered down a proposed U.N. war crimes declaration to delete the crucial phrase that the extermination reports “leave no room for doubt.” In 1943, as pressure mounted for rescue of Jews trapped in the Nazi extermination machinery, the diplomats instructed the U.S. legation to stop sending more reports of the exterminations, even though they knew that 6,000 Jews were being killed daily at a single location in Poland. Among their reasons: Rescue would have interfered with the war effort, and even if it succeeded, there was no place to put any large number of rescued Jews.

The stain on American honor would have lasted for eternity but for the fact that young lawyers in the Treasury Department discovered what the State Department had done. These lawyers, all Christians and idealists, did not intellectualize or rationalize the State Department’s conduct. They instantly internalized it. They understood deep down, because they possessed a moral core that had never developed in the diplomats of the State Department, how wrong this was, and they set out to stop it. Ultimately, they succeeded, in part by writing reports to their boss, the Jewish secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., which he used to convince President Roosevelt that a scandal was about to explode under him. The Jewish rescue portfolio was yanked from the State Department and vested in a newly created agency, the War Refugee Board, which is credited with saving 200,000 Jews (the board found places to put them, and their rescue did not interfere with military operations).

Which brings me back to Susan Rice. Of course any analogy between Ambassador Rice and those heartless wartime U.S. diplomats or between the Congo and Nazi Germany would be unjustified. But a contemporary senior American diplomat surely knew of the moral disgrace of the wartime U.S. diplomats during the Holocaust and, at minimum, should have been sensitive to not treading anywhere near their immoral footsteps. Even if Ambassador Rice missed the various works on the subject, including A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power, now a special assistant to President Obama and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights at the National Security Council (come to think of it, where was she in all this?), it’s safe to say that Rice ignored the consequences of recent callous American diplomacy with which she is undoubtedly familiar. In 1994 President Clinton failed to take effective measures to stop the genocidal massacres in Rwanda, and he now says, “I don’t think we could have ended the violence, but I think we could have cut it down. And I regret it,”

The only regret I have about the withdrawal of Ambassador Rice’s bid is that she may escape questioning about her handling of M23, which likely would have come up at some point in a confirmation hearing. Would she have conceded that her policy was insensitive to the moral implications of U.S. diplomats once again blocking reports of massacres and diluting U.N. condemnations of those massacres? Or would she have insisted that fine-tuned diplomatic requirements had trumped the moral issues? These questions raise issues vital to the American response to humanitarian crises, and now they will not be asked. That is the only loss to America from Susan Rice’s failed bid to become secretary of state.

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The real is that Susan Rice was denied being confirmed as Sec of State, is because of John McCain’s hateful racism! It’s a shame and appalling what happen to Susan Rice, because of McCain’s racism, and bitterness towards President Obama. McCain has been a racist for years dating back to 1988, when McCain was one of only a few GOP senators that voted against the MLK Holiday. Too bad because Ms. Rice is the military and foreign affairs expert NOT John McCain. What McCain is,is a old, bitter, hateful warmongering liar! http://pol.moveon.org/mccain10/thanks.html?id=-17340335-0gXtorx

And yet, McCain and the Republicans had no trouble voting for Condi Rice as Secretary of State, after she deliberately ignored vehement warnings from the CIA that an attack, from Al Qaeda, was imminent. And she went on to become Ms. Mushroom Cloud and WMD’s with lying rhetoric ending with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraq civilians deaths of people who did nothing to us. Ambassador Susan Rice can not possible be compared to that. I guess the real reason Ambassador Rice didn’t deserve to be Secretary of State, was because she was a Democrat.

It’s too bad Susan Rice won’t have the opportunity as Secretary of State to preach her Hate Whitey message across the Global South. Now those poor benighted denizens of the sepia spectrum may only hope for John Kerry & wind-surfing lessons on the Zambesi.

It’s not enough to reiterate a Central Intelligence briefing of the Benghazi incident; this was her litmus test of her personal intelligence of what is happening in the world, and her failure to question what she read before delivering it to the world was her ultimate failure in becoming Secretary of State.